De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

PS: I have an alternative proposal for Ubuntu ... re-write dconf for Ubuntu to set not only the dconf database but also to make synchronous, sympathetic changes to Qsettings. Integrate Qt applications without requiring any re-write by authors of said qt applications.

Because that's an outright stupid and horrible idea. What next? A configuration merge engine which asks the user in toolkit-independent manner how differences in two supposedly simultaneously managed config backends should be merged?

"PS: I have an alternative proposal for Ubuntu ... re-write dconf for Ubuntu to set not only the dconf database but also to make synchronous, sympathetic changes to Qsettings. Integrate Qt applications without requiring any re-write by authors of said qt applications.

Because that's an outright stupid and horrible idea. What next? A configuration merge engine which asks the user in toolkit-independent manner how differences in two supposedly simultaneously managed config backends should be merged? "

Yes, I have reconsidered ... a better approach is for Ubuntu to write a replacement for QSettings class and qtconfig, such the the replacement libraries run with the rest of Qt only when GNOME runs. This maintains the dconf database as the repository of all GNOME settings, and Qt applications running under GNOME would see those settings translated from the dconf database.

If one also installed KDE on the same machine (perhaps for different users to use as their preferred desktop), when KDE ran the exact same Qt applications they would see the KDE desktop settings for that user, since KDE would be running the default QSettings class and qtconfig settings.

So, I agree, doing it that way around is better.

However, either way is still better than what Shuttleworth proposes, requiring Qt applications to be re-written to run under a Ubuntu-unique version of GNOME.